


Just say the word and I can be gone in an hour

by Kolleh



Category: Tokyo Demons Series - Lianne Sentar
Genre: Multi, Polyamory, Vaguely cyberpunk AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 10:43:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8369233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kolleh/pseuds/Kolleh
Summary: Ayase and Kado have one last job to finish before they go home.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Nighttime is wasted on the owls  
> And the bloodshot eyes on the prowl  
> Humid air, sticky skin  
> Doesn't let much else in...

The warehouse was little more than a polycrete cube, abandoned and striped with orange smears of rust. Any machinery that once protected the goods inside had been cannibalized for parts by scavengers. There was no sign of anyone on the street, nor any sound coming from behind the corrugated steel door, unless one pressed their ear close enough to hear the hoarse, whispering voice.

Ayase waited outside. The breeze curled cold fingers against her bare stomach, carrying the scent of wet trash and manufacturing chemicals. Idly, she detached an insect from her neck and walked it down along her fingers, where it rested, flicking its antenna. Its chitinous back gleamed like an oil drop. Through its second set of eyes her face was a blotch of grey shadow and drying orange-red from where her forehead had been slammed into the floor. Bits of bloodied gravel embedded in her skin tinkled to the ground when her fingers brushed against it.

She flipped her hand, clenched it in a fist. Opened it again, palm empty.

Her comm buzzed; hot pink, sans-serif text, with an add-on effect that made it gleam when it scrolled past.

**_Got any good news for me yet?_ **

_Kadoyuki’s working on it. Can’t give details over the comm._

**_Shouri tweaked this connection so it’s 110% private. Why Kado and not Sachi?_ **

_We’ve been trying to keep Sachi away from jobs lately. Should I know who that is?_

**_The guys living with you in a shitty outskirts apartment w/ ugly wallpaper instead of the one I wanted to buy you._ **

**_Okay stop. Stop whatever you’re typing. She’s Jo’s friend._ **

Jo Oda. The “live-in bodyguard.” (From the wink and the way Mitsuko wrapped herself around his arm, it wasn’t hard to guess at more.) Mitsuko hadn’t been particularly forthcoming about what he wanted the information for, or which organization he was representing. It certainly wasn’t the tiny church they were meeting at to drop the info off.

**_Jo has v. cool friends, because he is a v. cool person. Also he makes me breakfast._ **

_I like him better than Miki._

**_You threw Miki out of my flat and burned his socks._  ** **_Not even all his socks. Half of every pair of socks. He was calling me to bitch about it for weeks after we broke up._ **

_Miki called you a slut. Oda does your laundry._

**_I caught him cleaning the fridge yesterday._ **

_He’s trying too hard._

**_I know, we’re working on it. Give your bfs kisses from me and make sure you drop the data off by morning, K? Leave the target in the warehouse. We can get her back home for you._ **

Mitsuko’s avatar faded offline. It was 1:20 exactly now; Kadoyuki was cutting it close. Any longer and the neuroscrambler they brought wouldn’t reliably wipe the target’s memories of being abducted.

As if on cue, an electric crackle resounded from the building, familiar blue light shining through the fissures in the door. Inside she found Kadoyuki packing his equipment away, his eyes even more distant than usual. Their target, Rumi Fujimura, was propped against a tarnished piece of industrial piping with her sleeves pulled back, exposing snaking black lines. Gang tattoos, or possibly a haematopoietic body mod.

_How did it go?_

No response.

“Kadoyuki?”

His head turned to her in increments. His gaze was fixed so far away it could have been tracing satellite paths.

“Fine”, he said quietly. “Once she understood I wouldn’t hurt her.” He slammed the case closed and brushed wordlessly past her to the exit.

 

* * *

 

The subway car was miraculously empty. They took their usual positions: Kadoyuki pressed against the wall, Ayase with an arm to either side, sheltering him. The ache in her head was becoming a dull, insistent throbbing. She distracted herself with the ads playing above them. A mechanical hand crushed a CGI fruit that burst into gears:  _Would you eat a tomato created by machines?_

"Yes", said a voice below her. She snorted. Kado smiled faintly back, with the same vague preoccupation. There was something chafing at the edges of him. She knew better than to try to bring it into focus by force.

“Thank you”, she said instead. He looked up at her.

“I’ve never had the chance to say it before, but it’s been different since you got here. Sachi’s never really…” she frowned. “It’s nice, being able to leave him home, where he doesn’t have to touch anyone scared of him. Your power's as useful for what we do as his was.”

“It’s not exactly a different power”, Kadoyuki said softly.

_Sachi couldn’t tell what I’m thinking about right now._

“No”, he agreed at last, coming to some personal decision. “He couldn’t. But…”

He reached up and delicately rested the back of two fingers against her cheek.

“Confusion”, he said after a moment. “And surprise―you’re not used to me touching you. Warmth, because I did.”

Her eyes widened slowly.

“Your…your head hurts. It’s stinging. You’ve got bruises down most of your back, along your spine. It’s worse than you told me.”

“Stop it!” she snapped, jerking away. He met her gaze evenly.

_Since when?_

“Three months. Since I spent the night with Sachi.”

She remembered that night. Or rather, she remembered the morning after: Kado, wide-eyed, jerking away from Sachi’s casual touch as though he’d been burned; Sachi, face frozen, his smile shifting into something falser and bitterer. She had thought it was too soon, old traumas not ready to be overwritten. A misjudgement.

“That's not how it works", she said tightly.

“It is for me. At least”, his voice faltered, “I think it is. I’ve never…confirmed it with anyone else.”

At the next stop a party-weary crowd stumbled in, and Kadoyuki fell silent. They disembarked in a less grubby part of town, a commercial district with all the shops powered down. Holographs flickered above, dying the street in a shifting collage of red, gold, purple. They went up an elevator, through a glass tube bridge with a few corporates speaking tersely into their comms, cut through the back alley of a bar with low, throaty singing accompanying the swell of a saxophone.

“There’s something else I want to tell you”, Kadoyuki said, when they turned down a deserted street at last.

The walk had reinstilled a measure of serenity in her. She turned reluctantly.

“The marks on Fujimura-san’s arms that looked like veins, I’ve seen them before tonight, on…someone I know. He’s here, in this city. Looking for me. I could hide in the darkest parts of the underground, and he would still find me.”

Ayase and Sachi had speculated sometimes about what Kado might be running from, comparing their evidence: the prosthetic leg, impossibly higher-tech than they could afford; the paranoia about using a comm. The flinching.

“If someone’s after you, we can—”

“No. If he finds out that I’m here, if he finds out that I'm…living with you…” A peculiar expression crossed his face. Suddenly, his head snapped up.

“You can’t tell Sachi.”

 “Kado—”

 _“No._  I’ll tell him everything myself, just not now. _Please._ Promise me.” He held her gaze until she nodded grudging assent.

They had reached the bottom of the church steps. To the left the road fell away, a low wall the only thing guarding against the sheer drop. Kadoyuki’s expression had turned inward again. They studied each other in the light cast by the church's glowing windows. Ayase felt a sudden, desperate need to be home.

“I’ll deliver the information”, Kado said softly. “I want to pray tonight.”

“Hold on, I’m flying back.” Ayase dragged a nearby trashbin to the wall. From there it was simple to clamber up. She edged along until she found a spot hidden from the road and stripped, shivering in the open air. To think she had once been so scared of this.

“Catch!” she called, tossing the bundled clothing down into Kadoyuki’s waiting arms.

She sat down, the metal cold and smooth against her bare thighs. The city hummed below her dangling feet. Neon-lit signs and windows coiled down into darkness, hovercars roaring as they hurtled through the underbelly of tunnels.

"Ayase-san." She turned, but whatever he was going to say, he didn't. Instead Kadoyuki bowed gravely to her, eyes resting firmly on her face when he straightened. She waved as he trudged up the church steps, watched as he was bathed briefly in the light from the open door and vanished inside.

She gripped the edge of her seat and lifted herself up on her arms, like a swimmer lowering themselves down into a pool, swung once, twice, and let go.

For one shining instant she was in freefall. Her hair whipped in a carefree pennant above her. She fell swift as stone, swift as the clear bright rain that could never reach the sunless recesses of a city entrenched in itself. She pushed this moment longer every time, waiting until her nerves screeched and her eyes leaked while the world dropped away. Hold, hold, a bit longer― _r_ _elease._

Her body fragmented in the air like a glass cracking against a barroom floor. She spilled out of her skin in waves, the city's endless lights reflected back in the myriad facets of a thousand compound eyes. The locals who saw her shrugged her off as one more infestation.

It didn’t take long before she was home. The balcony door had been left open for her when she arrived, a convenient change of clothes draped over the railing. Sachi was waiting in the living room.

“How was it?” he asked muzzily. The remnants of gel in his hair held it at odd angles where he’d slept on it. His glasses were askew. A sudden rush of affection blotted out her exhaustion

Instead of answering, Ayase crossed the room and caught his hand in hers. A pink flush spread across his cheeks as her emotions flowed through to him: joy, pleasure, warmth. She let him feel the whole ugly tangle of what was beneath, too, the shock and confusion, and, inevitably, the lingering secret that wasn’t hers to tell. She watched as he unravelled and analyzed her, assessing what needed to be put right. Kindness always won out over curiosity with Sachi. He wouldn’t ask her any questions now that couldn’t be asked later, when she was feeling better.

“I’m hungry”, she said finally. Sachi looked up, startled, and laughed. His hand drew away, ending the silent interrogation.

"I've got oden on the stove, but you can start with the onigiri in the fridge. I'm going to wait a bit longer for Kado."

He did wait, for as long as it was feasible. They were forced to eat alone eventually. Sachi kept up a stream of cheery chatter, glancing surreptitiously at his comm screen under the table. Ayase waited, with a sudden, sick understanding in her heart.

_"If he finds out that I'm...living with you..."_

They fell asleep on the couch, still waiting. In the morning, Ayase called Mitsuko's comm. Delivery of the info confirmed, thanks so much, did she want to hit up Blue Light this week? No, thanks, not right now. Sachi paced the apartment, dashed suddenly outside, came back with reddened eyes. Ayase felt half-mad trying to decide whether to tell him what she knew, or if somehow Kadoyuki would find out if she did and then he would truly never come home.

The second night was worse.

On the third night, she woke to the sound of noises in the hall. She stumbled off the futon, flicking her vision to the bug she left for surveillance.

Kadoyuki, at home, safe. Kadoyuki, with his fists clutched in Sachi's shirt, dragging their mouths together. He hadn't touched Sachi in three months.

"Stop", Sachi said, a beat slower than he should have, "Stop, what the—the hell, Kado, you can't just—"

"Please", breathed Kadoyuki, straining upward again. Sachi froze as their lips brushed, then pushed him off once more, shaking.

" _Stop._ I mean it. I can tell you don't want it."

Kadoyuki flinched away. A tremble of tension coursed through his body.

"Kado."

Sachi reached out hesitantly. Kadoyuki caught his hand, bringing it up to cup his face. His eyes fluttered shut. A wet half-sob rattled out of his chest.

"Kado", Sachi repeated gently. "Tell me what's wrong so I can fix it."

Kado turned his mouth into Sachi's palm, mumbling something. Ayase saw Sachi shiver.

"What's wrong”, said Kado, “is that I don't want to leave."

**Author's Note:**

> And it's been growing since the day we planted it years ago  
> It's hard to start knowing when to stop digging  
> Let the roots take hold...  
> \- Forest City Lovers, Phodilus and Tyto


End file.
